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4
from book project 4, 1994She wanted to live in the four a.m. hour when it's still dark but the birds are singing, when if you awoke from a long sleep, you wouldn't know if it was dawn or dusk, first showing of stars or last. She wanted to live in the four o'clock hesitation of the sweeping clock hand where statues come to life and skeptics dream. When in the glow of street lamps the day propositions the night and profound beauty meets sublime ugliness. One doesn't know whether to laugh, shriek or swoon from the ecstacy and horror. She found beauty in this time. She found beauty: - in the abdomen of the cicada. - in the hairs that grew from her nipples. - in the trash and the bagel o matic. - in bones and teeth and tupperware. - in sward swallowers and Tchaikovsky. - in antique lace and angsty teenage boys. - in the sweet agony frozen in her lover's face. - in the drowning color of the four a.m. sky. She wanted to take the four a.m clock from its hanging and lay it flat like a blue glass platter holding a waveless sea or a sun dial reading moonbeams. If she was ugly, she would be profoundly so. If she could not be beautiful, on a small enough clock face maybe she could straddle that line. Once she loved a man who was also seduced by four a.m.. He loved the moment of first light, the pivot point when melancholy drunken trolls fed birds before turning to stone. In fact, it was only turning she loved. He had none for the trolls or beak-bitten worms and his women were always pretty. Once she courted a witch who wore lipstick, dildoes and a pink bubble watch. The witch liked the cute pink watch face and shiny silver airplane that buzzed around each minute and the aesthetic irony of it on her wrist. What our girl monster liked was how the airplane circled a map of the earth seen from the north pole, reducing time zones to seconds. The equation reminded her of something precious that lay just beyond reach of the groping fingers of her memory. She liked the frustration. She liked the frustration: - of strip-teasing for the blind. - of screaming at the deaf. - of lighting fires under the frigid. - of fighting evil. - of trying to stop the hand of the sundial to hold at four a.m.. She must have loved the frustration, as Pam had grown to love the psychiatric hospital and as Priscilla had grown to love her wheelchair. Our girl wondered about this four o'clock, fifty-nine second love and asked hersef if it was the same love she had felt a minute earlier. She wondered if she really loved the moment or only the dawn-lit trolls cursing themselves while straining to push blood through stone veins and the hourglass sucking its stomach to stop time. View images: from book project 4 © 2004 Beth Zonderman |
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